New York City has long been known for its rat population – but there’s been a dramatic surge in recent years. According to a recent estimate, there are now as many as 3 million rats in New York City, an increase of nearly 1 million over the last decade. They’ve benefited from the food waste left by Covid-era outdoor diners as well as recent cuts to the city’s sanitation department, creating the “perfect storm” for a ratsplosion, says Julie Menin, a city councilmember representing Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her office has been “inundated” with rat complaints: “We were literally hearing from parents about rats running across their children’s feet as they’re walking them to school.”
Now Menin says her district has an answer: gassing them. Amid the post-Covid rat spike, Menin’s staff researched solutions and learned that Boston and San Diego had started fumigating rats using carbon monoxide. So Menin’s office located an exterminator in New York that uses the technique, a veteran exterminator named Matt Deodato, “and it’s really made a big difference”. Could this be the way to finally rid New York City of its most notorious residents?
To find out, I visited Manhattan’s 86th Street, an elegant tree-lined corridor in Menin’s district that, to Deodato’s trained eye, is more like a conflict zone teeming with defensive features for rats. Deodato points out a crack in the pavement where a tree root has bulged through – “that creates a little gap, and now the rats can get in there and nest”. We near a tree planter, with a pleasant assortment of petunias, and he suddenly halts, pointing out a hole in the soil: “We’ve got an active burrow here.” He sets up his weapon: the new carbon monoxide machine that could be the most effective rat-killing technique New York City has ever seen.
The idea is simple: pump carbon monoxide into the rat burrows in New York City’s yards, parks and tree pits, and the rats will “go to sleep” before suffocating. The gas naturally dissipates afterward, which makes it safer than methods such as poison bait or traps, which can ensnare pets and other wildlife. And it works fast. “We hit hard, kill quick. It just seems more efficient to me than the other systems,” says Deodato.
Deodato generates the carbon monoxide using a small, wheeled machine called the BurrowRx, which mixes the gas with visible tracer smoke. He inserts the machine’s hose into the suspected burrow’s entrance and revs up the machine like a lawnmower. Moments later, wisps start billowing out from a number of other nearby spots in the ground, revealing the layout of the rats’ tunnel network. “There’s never just one hole,” Deodato says.
We stand there for a few moments as he lets the smoke build up. (Deodato coughs – “I got a tickle; it wasn’t from the gas,” he quickly explains.) Then he buries all the burrow exits except for one. Deodato waits at the remaining exit, gripping a three-pronged gardening tool like a golf club. “He’s going to run out here,” Deodato says. Sure enough, an enormous rat pokes its head out. Deodato swings and misses, and the rat ducks back inside. We wait another minute and the rat doesn’t reappear. “That’s OK, he’s gonna die in there,” Deodato says.
But New York City rats are a highly formidable foe. “I admire them because they’ll do anything to survive,” Deodato says. He’s seen them gnaw through solid cinderblock – “an amazing thing to witness”. In their yearlong lifespans, a female rat can have seven or eight litters of babies: “She could give birth on Monday, and get pregnant again on Tuesday – that’s how perfect they are.” Even the babies are strong. “You see a garbage bag moving, and then a baby punches his way out of the bag.”
Does he ever feel bad after killing them? “I have nothing personal against them. It’s just business,” Deodato says.
Menin’s office says that Deodato’s technique has achieved “an impressive eradication rate of nearly 100% in the tree pits where it was applied”. And after a year of the treatments, “the complaints to our office really started to dissipate”, Menin says. Her office paid for the first year of services with a $10,000 city grant, and doubled that amount this year. She wants to expand the method to more streets in her district and says other officials have reached out to learn how they can do it too.
But is it the cure-all to New York’s ratastrophe? No amount of innovative extermination will defeat New York’s rats if the city doesn’t tackle the source. On the morning of my visit, the otherwise stately walkways of East 86th Street are piled high with horrifying garbage bag mountains: “I mean, this is just endless. You might as well just come out here with the dinner bell,” Deodato says. And while there’s been a recent trend of using bags that are specially treated with peppermint oil – a smell that rats are said to hate – “it’s not going to stop them,” Deodato says. “It’s just going to give them fresh breath after they’ve eaten the rotten food.”
Since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has made an ambitious attempt to get New York City’s garbage bag piles into lidded containers. “New York City used to be known for our mean streets, but, going forward, we’re going to be known for our clean streets,” Adams said in June. But that effort – which Menin says she “fully supports” – will take years.
Without better trash disposal, the rats “ain’t going anywhere”, Deodato says. “We could wipe out every rat in New York City. Give it a year, and they’ll all be right back.” We walk past a plastic bag on the pavement, half-open, revealing a full loaf of bread inside. “How do I battle this? I don’t,” he says. “We win little battles, but we don’t win the war.”
